Richard Smoke (October 21, 1944, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania – May 1995, Sarasota, California) was an American historian and political scientist.

He graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1965, and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in political science in 1972. His doctoral thesis was entitled Toward the control of escalation: a historical analysis and his advisor was William W. Kaufmann. A professor of political science, he became the Research Director of the Watson Institute's Center For Foreign Policy Development at Brown University in 1985. Smoke committed suicide in 1995.^[1][2]

He was the co-founder of the Center for Peace and Common Security.^[3] An internship at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies has been named in his honor.

• 1975 Bancroft Prize

• "America's 'New Thinking'", Foreign Policy, Fall, 1988
• Alexander L. George; Richard Smoke (1974). Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-03838-6. Richard Smoke.
• War: Controlling Escalation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978. ISBN 978-0-674-94595-1
• National Security and Nuclear Weapons. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983.
• Beyond the Hotline: Controlling a Nuclear Crisis: A Report to the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. (with William Langer Ury) Cambridge, MA: Nuclear Negotiation Project, Harvard Law School, 1984.
• Paths to Peace: Exploring the Feasibility of Sustainable Peace. (with Willis Harman) Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0-8133-0492-2
• Think About Nuclear Arms Control: Understanding the Arms Race. New York: Walker, 1988. ISBN 978-0-8027-6762-2
• Mutual Security: A New Approach to Soviet-American Relations. (editor with Andrei Kotunov) New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0-333-54673-4
• "National Security and the Nuclear Dilemma: An Introduction to the American Experience in the Cold War." McGraw Hill, 1993. ISBN 0-07-059352-3
• Richard Smoke, ed. (1996). Perceptions of Security: Public Opinion and Expert Assessments in Europe's New Democracies. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-4813-5.